"There's a hell of a lot of conferences on this topic and not enough doing. I'd rather that we did some stuff, failed at some stuff and re-did it again and actually recognised that right now this is a case of all hands on deck."

The Harvard academic described the issue of managing "information disorder" as "the world's most complex jigsaw" and said the problem would take 50 years to resolve.

"We need to get to the point where we say, this is amazing, but we need to be careful," she said.

She told the conference that she hated the phrase "fake news".

"It used to be something we agreed upon. It was websites that looked like professional websites designed specifically for people to make money," she said.

Fake news now 'weaponised'

She said the term had been progressively muddied until it had become meaningless.

"It became weaponised and it was being used against the news media, not just by Donald Trump but by politicians around the world to describe reporting they didn't like," she said.

She described the "information disorder", which she said is pulsing through democracies around the world, and warned that as Australia draws heavily on US reporting it's easy to think that the issue is confined to Facebook and politics.

"In fact it's a global problem," she said, pointing to the elections currently being held in Brazil.

Her institution is working on a collaboration between 24 news organisations to find and debunk information around the election.

"The reason Brazil is so important as a testing ground is that it's more polarised than the US and has incredibly high levels of WhatsApp usage," she said.

A typical response to the rising issue of "information disorder" is the promotion of media literacy, particularly in the young, but she said that had its own challenges.

"We have done such a good job of media literacy that nobody trusts anything anymore," she said.

Public ignorant of journalism crisis

Members of old and new media organisations are debating the future of public journalism and how to compete in, and report on, the new digital space at a time when it is increasingly being occupied by hostile forces.

Panel members discussed the challenges of publishing public journalism at a time when revenues and audiences were disappearing with the rate and consequence of an arterial bleed.

"I don't know if the Australian public know there's a crisis in public journalism here in Australia," said Louisa Graham, chief executive of the Walkley Foundation.

The ABC and established commercial media are racing to find their audiences in the new media spaces.